Stop it! Stupid, clickbait headlines that do not reflect reality

in news •  2 years ago 

This is true with all media outlets right now. The key to generating traffic is to appeal to a certain demographic's feelings with a headline, then try a little bit to make the article at least somewhat about the very untrue headline that was completely made up in the first place.

Mostly I think that liberal outlets are more guilty of this, but the conservative ones are far from innocent and just like on the other side of the fence there are the usual suspects in the conservative world.


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I would say at least once a week there is a story about how Pelosi is DONE. Looking at the tiny snippet of information about this particular article, you can tell by the very vague wording that it is designed to accomplish one of two things. Based on the limited information in the snippet, one could come to the very untrue conclusion that Pelosi is going to lose her position - which of course she is not. The other conclusion would be that a person that actually wants to know the details would be forced to click on the "fearless report" article.

The actual article discusses the usual talking point that actually are backed up by polls indicating that Pelosi will lose her seat as speaker of the House later this year but not because of any direct actions on her part. She hasn't violated any more rules than any politician does on a regular basis, but because the Democrats will lose the majority by numbers, and therefore the Speaker position.

the article in question that the original snippet leads to doesn't present any new information other than the fact that the D's and the R's disagree with one another when they are doing their showboating in Congress. This is something that has happened every single day those groups have met ever since I have been alive and presumably since its inception.

It simply has quotes from prominent Republicans making bold statements about how Pelosi's days are numbered and how she is out of touch with Americans etc. Yeah yeah, this isn't news... I think anyone with any sense about them knows that the changing of the guard is inevitable and that almost all Congressmen are out of touch with normal everyday people.

I don't like Pelosi personally and can't believe that she, and many other people in Congress get elected over and over again despite the fact that almost all of them have managed to accomplish almost nothing in their decades-long time in office. Writing an article like this is what "Fearless Report" does on a daily basis. They are simply the CNN-like branch of the conservative movement. The only thing they do is to keep throwing gasoline on the fire to make sure everyone stays angry. I don't think anyone is going to learn anything new on websites like this one, but apparently thousands if not millions of people every day look to them for information.

We are not going to get smarter as a group if people keep falling for this trick.


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It is such a crying shame people fall for this shit. I mean seriously, I am scared to death of being ignorant. The people that consume “the news” as their main source of information and believe it…or worse those BS sites that perpetuate “opinions” like your talking about…they are asking to have a distorted view of the world…no context…little substance…virtually no fact…and emotionally charged which causes people not to think clearly. This leads to bad habits, heightened suspicion, poor decisions (especially in their personal lives).

My experience with this is not in politics, but with finance. Financial news is probably less emotionally charged than political news, and a little bit more fact, but they still do a mediocre job at explaining how things work.

There are certain myths that are in the financial ether that gets people into a lot of trouble…using a house as an investment…or as collateral for debt financing…that is peddled at scale…especially to lower socioeconomic individuals…which gets people into a heap of financial trouble when they enter a recession.

Or when these fund managers or analysts get on CNBC or any other financial network and say why they like a stock, or there’s value still in the market, or the reason a stock goes down or up, or whatever… those are pitches…to get people to buy those stocks from those companies that are selling…especially during recessions when companies want to offload risk (sell risky assets)…so they find some poor dumb bastard to sell to that thinks they're getting a discount, and they're not.

Not having a good grip on reality is incredibly devastating financially to people, and also for their mental health, that is the most devastating thing about dis and misinformation. That is why intelligence agencies use it, to develop assets, and get people (assets) to do things that benefit “the handler” and are against their own interests.

People need to listen to Elon Musk more. He has talked about first principles a lot, breaking things down into their constituent parts, understanding the foundation, why things work the way they do, and then reasoning from there. Understanding foundations takes more work though, more work than being spoon-fed BS…especially from people that have less intelligence than the consumer does…which is incredibly tragic.

How do we know if the people that are giving us this information are dumber than we are? If they are, would we be consuming what they’re vomiting up?

News, opinion websites, etc…do not give good foundational knowledge or any foundational knowledge. And that is essential to understanding the world around us. There are tons of places to get foundational knowledge of how things work, the history of the issue, why we do what we do, the players that are involved, the money that is involved.

Anyway, as you can tell this is a rant, hehe. That's how good your post is :)

As always, you have given a wonderful and thought-provoking response. You are correct on all points. I always had my suspicions about any investment-oriented TV program. If this was such a great idea that they had come up with, why tell everyone? It's such an obvious trap and one I fell for years ago with a stock called 3com I think it was. It went to zero value a few years after this "great tip!" that was on a widely-watched show on one of the major networks.

I think the best thing to do these days is to just not look at the news for the most part because for many including me, the objective of these shows is to intentionally misinform or even worse, to program the audience to think a certain way. Unfortunately, I think that large swaths of the population are prone to do exactly that.